censorship

Since 1990 the Electronic Frontier Foundation has defended free speech, privacy, innovation, and consumer rights online. Bogus copyright and trademark complaints have threatened all kinds of creative expression on the Internet. EFF’s Hall Of Shame collects the worst of the worst.

DeBeer’s attempt to take down New York Times Special Edition website is listed on the EFF’s Hall of Shame. I am proud.

In the summer of 2010, we asked artists and curators worldwide to record themselves responding and commenting on the following questions:

What are or should be the taboos honored by cultural institutions?
Why should public funds be spent to support artwork that might offend some segment of the general public?
Does “concern for the community” justify (self)censorship?
What alternative institutional models are emerging in the face of restrictive conditions attached to public funding?

The responses and creative comments of artists and curators worldwide are collected in Power, Taboo and the Artist, an ongoing video project produced by the National Coalition Against Censorship and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School.

In Censoring Culture, the nationally known author of the ArtSpeak books and the head of the National Coalition Against Censorship's Arts Program bring together the latest thinking from art historians, cultural theorists, legal scholars, and psychoanalysts, as well as first-person accounts by artists and advocates, to give us a comprehensive understanding of censorship in a new century.

Contributors include:• J.M. Coetzee, Judy Blume, and others on self-censorship• Hans Haacke on the marriage of art and money• DeeDee Halleck on the military-media-industrial complex• Marjorie Heins on violence and children • Randall Kennedy on the risks of regulating hate speech• Lawrence Lessig on creativity and copyright in the electronic age• Judith Levine on shielding children from sex• Diane Ravitch on sensitivity guidelines for national testing• Douglas Thomas on hackers and hacking culture

Italy's Berlusconi regime, already known around the world as an enemy of
free speech and popular access to the tools of communication, has now
floated a proposal to require Italians to get an "uploader's license" in order
to put any "moving pictures" on the Internet. The government claims that
this is required as part of the EU's product placement disclosure rules, which
is about as ridiculous assertion as I've heard this month.

"The decree subjects the transmission of images on the Web to rules typical of television and requires prior ministerial authorization, with an incredible limitation on the way the Internet currently functions," opposition Democratic Party lawmaker Paolo Gentiloni told the press conference.

Article 4 of the decree specifies that the dissemination over the Internet "of moving pictures, whether or not accompanied by sound," requires ministerial authorization.

Delete City uses the ridiculous storage allotment of web hosting services like Dreamhost to cache large amounts of user generated content from sites like YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, etc. and then monitors to see if any of this content is subsequently taken down. When it finds removed content, it automatically posts the content to your WordPress blog. The nature of the content can be customized by the user by site, keyword, and other criteria. Devious? Maybe. But also one step in the fight against censorship.